Friday, August 19, 2011

NSFW. Shibari in mixed media

Well, I think this is the first time I've broken out the NSFW tag for something explicitly sexual. Hi, family members I regularly direct here!

This piece started out as a simple figure study, that wound up taking a pose that couldn't really be achieved without a full suspension. So I grabbed some embroidery thread and a needle and did just that.

The concept of combining drawings with thread is far from original- I'm pretty sure I've even seen shibari themed pencil and thread art before. There are some beautiful ink and ribbon mixed media pieces up in the aerial studio I train at that have probably been subconsciously pushing my art brain in this direction. I'd like to imagine there's a "connect-the-ropes" cardboard shibari book out there that comes with a few lengths of shoelace and reinforced holes around naked figures. (If not, why the hell hasn't someone made it yet?)

A shot from another angle to give some idea of how the embroidery thread looks on flat paper. I deliberately left the tie between the ankles loose, in an attempt to make it look as if it were hanging loosely.

It should be clear from this attempt that I am painfully inexperienced in shibari. I didn't even break out a reference book for this, even though I know there's one less than 20 feet away on our bookshelf in the living room. I'm a lazy artist like that, particularly when I'm scribbling in my sketchbook at midnight in front of an episode of Misfits. I've been tying people up in my art since middle school, to varying degrees of divorced from reality, but even I know you can't suspend someone from ankles, crotch and knee points. That's what drawings are for.

I'd like to do a few more pieces in this theme using watercolors, heavy-weight paper, and thin hemp rope. If you look for it, you can see where I mistakenly broke through the paper trying to feed the needle in blind. My subject was very patient with me, despite all the unintentional piercing.

A shot of the back of the page. You can fill in the figure a bit if you know what to look for, but otherwise, I find it to be a really interesting negative of the image.

What is all this?

This is the art repository of Mish W.

I created this blog as the result of a self-pitying rant about how little art I was capable of producing on a regular basis. After listening patiently for a minute, a friend of mine hit me over the head with this revelation: if you just make ONE THING every damn day, you end up with a hell of a lot of work, whether you intended to or not.

In order to break out of both an emotional black hole and an artistic coma, I ran with the idea, and made this blog to record my daily attempts at creation.